The Happiness Machine

Philosopher Caroline West believes the word 'happiness' should be abolished because it has become a catch all for such a wide variety of states of being and ways of living that it has lost all meaning. But where to from there? What are our alternatives? And how might a happiness machine help us think about the problem? Join Caroline West as she addresses the recent Sydney Writers' Festival.

Transcript

Alan Saunders: Hi, I'm Alan Saunders, here to bring you The Philosopher's Zone, and to bring you joy.

Beethoven's Ode to Joy

Alan Saunders: The Ode to Joy from Beethoven's 9th Symphony, and it's difficult to imagine anything more joyful than that. But what does joy have to do with happiness?

Joyful people are presumably happy, but surely there's more to happiness than those moments we call joy. In fact, perhaps we're wrong to think that there's just one word that encompasses all the ways there are of being happy.

Well that was the subject of a talk given as part of the Sydney Writers' Festival by Caroline West, senior lecturer in philosophy at the University of Sydney. It's called 'The Happiness Mistake.'

Caroline West: There are many diverse and competing conceptions of the nature of happiness. What one person means by happiness can be completely different to what the next person means. If someone said that they wanted to talk about momentary sensation, enduring mood, desires, beliefs, global life attitudes, achievements, activities, states of the world and what makes for a flourishing human life, you might expect them to be talking for quite some time, and you might also expect them to use different words to talk about each of these different subjects.

Yet one word is often used to talk about all these things, and that word in English is 'happiness'. Happiness can be used to refer to any one of six really quite different things. I'm going to call these six very different things the Six Conceptions of Happiness, and let me tell you what they are again, so you know what they are and so you can see how very different they are.

So, Conception 1: happiness is a momentary sensation, such as pleasure or enjoyment.

2. An enduring mood, like tranquility or contentment.

3. Believing that you're achieving your desires, that you're getting what you want.

Or 5. Believing that your life as a whole is going well by your own standards or priorities.

Or 6. Leading a life that's considered by some objective standpoint to be worthwhile, or worth living, or a flourishing human life.

The six things just listed are extraordinarily different. So different that you might reasonably wonder whether the fact that they're all referred to as happiness isn't just a linguistic accident. Like the etymological quirk that resulted in a bit of land at the edge of a river, and a financial institution both being called a 'bank'. Being called a 'bank' is about the only thing that a financial institution and a bit of land at the edge of a river, have in common. So it may be that the only thing that a fleeting feeling, such as pleasure, and a flourishing human life have in common, is that people are inclined to talk about both, using the same word, 'happiness'.

When an ambiguous word causes confusion sufficiently often, and when such confusion can have a range of undesirable consequences, you might take very seriously the thought that the word should be abolished. And I think we would should take very seriously the idea that the word 'happiness' should be abolished from our lexicon.

We should abolish the ambiguous word if using it causes great confusion and if the great confusion that it causes has really undesirable consequences, in favour of sort of more specific words that make clear what it is that we're talking about. And in the case of happiness, we have a whole bunch of more specific words right to hand. Let me just go through the six conceptions of happiness again by name: pleasure or enjoyment; tranquility; desire fulfillment; perceived desire fulfillment; life satisfaction; flourishing. Actually flourishing is probably still open to a number of interpretations, but we can sort that out.

So here's my call today. Let's stop talking about happiness, and instead say more precisely which of the six very different things that we might mean by using the word we have in mind. Well I'm actually not so optimistic as to think that people will actually stop using the word just because a philosopher tells them they should, but if we do keep using the word, it's incredibly important that we at least bear in mind how differently, just how differently the word 'happiness' can be used by different people, or even by the same person at different times.

Since otherwise we can be talking past each other, literally talking about different subjects without realising it. And I think this happens actually unfortunately often in discussions of happiness and perhaps especially in discussions about the value of happiness.

For instance, without wishing to pick on anyone in particular, some people write books or essays with titles such as Against Happiness; the title is shocking because many people are inclined to think that happiness is something worth pursuing. In fact some people take this to be true by definition, that happiness is something worth pursuing, because they use the word 'happiness' just to mean a flourishing or worthwhile human life, that's the sixth conception, or the 6th use of 'happiness' I mentioned before.

Well if you open the pages of a book with a title like Against Happiness, what you invariably find or almost invariably find is that by happiness the person means something like momentary pleasure. And when they claim that happiness is not worth seeking, what they mean is that momentary pleasure is not the only thing worth seeking.

It often happens that other people just can't resist the bait and they have to rise to argue about this, and insist in reply that happiness is n fact greatly valuable. Giving various reasons for thinking that happiness is very valuable, which reveal that what they mean by happiness is not momentary feelings of pleasure at all, but rather something else like leading a deeply fulfilling life, full of rich and varied and indisputably worthwhile activities.

So, one person insists that happiness is valuable, the other person insists that it's not. It looks, on the surface, like there's a substantive disagreement. But there's not. Each side agrees that momentary pleasure is not the only or even the necessarily most important value in life, and each side also agrees that a deeply fulfilling life of rich and varied and indisputably worthwhile activities is, well, by definition, worthwhile.

There's no substantive disagreement, and it's just a difference in how people are using the word. And I think a lot of apparent debates about happiness are like this, sort of non-debates with people talking past each other, and if I may speak bluntly, I think these debates are sort of pointless and they're a waste of everyone's time, because there's no genuine issue at stake, and I think that's one reason why we should really seriously consider just abolishing the word 'happiness'.

So while I think a lot of debates about happiness are actually non-debates of this sort, of course there could be and there sometimes actually is, genuine substantive disagreement about whether a particular kind of happiness is valuable.

For example, some people known in philosophical circles as normative or welfare hedonists really do think that pleasure, understood broadly to include not just bodily pleasures, but emotional and intellectual gratifications, really is the summum bonum, the ultimate good in life, the only thing that's worth seeking for its own sake. And someone like that, a normative hedonist, really would have a genuine disagreement with someone who says that pleasure is not worth seeking, or not the only thing that's worth seeking.

I should actually perhaps say because the word 'hedonism' in ordinary use has sort of selfish connotations, I should just say that normative hedonism as it's used in sort of philosophical circles is not the selfish view that everyone should pursue only their own happiness, or that only your own pleasure matters. In fact it's rather the view that for each and every person, for instance, for each and every one of us in this room, what would make our life go best for us, for each of us, is whatever would make it on balance, most pleasant. So often normative hedonism is sort of paired with a decidedly unselfish ethical theory that says that since everyone's pleasure matters equally, everyone's welfare matters equally, you're sometimes ethically obliged to sacrifice your own pleasure if that would being the greater pleasure to others.

That was the view for instance of classical utilitarians like Jeremy Bentham, and also in a slightly different form, is the view of Peter Singer.

So normative hedonism is thought by many to be mistaken, so normative hedonism being the view that what makes the person's life go best is whatever gives them the greatest balance of pleasure over pain over the course of their lives. That view is thought by many to be mistaken for the following kind of reason: Imagine a machine, call it an experience machine, which we can all hook ourselves up to, and if we do, it will simulate exactly the full range of desirable conscious experiences. Whatever conscious experiences we find desirable, you can hook yourself up to this machine and it will stimulate them perfectly. Of course in reality you'll be sitting in the chair or floating around in a pod, sort of like in The Matrix or something. But it would seem to you as if you're living the most wonderfully rich and diverse and fabulously pleasurable life. And once you've hooked yourself up, let's say you'll forget that you ever made the decision.

Just out of interest, how many people would hook themselves up for a day? For a week? For a month? For life? OK, All right, you two have no objection yet to normative hedonism, the rest of you see the point that it doesn't look like a life hooked up to the experience machine is a maximally valuable, flourishing human life, so to the extent that normative hedonism says it is, there's something wrong with normative hedonism. There's more to life that we care about than just pleasurable experience, and that's what you see if you wouldn't hook yourself up to that machine. It tells you that there are things in your life that you care about more than just pleasurable experiences. Maybe this isn't a revelation to many of you.

Note that the same objection works against any sort of purely subjective sort of account of wellbeing, so any theory of happiness, any theory that says happiness consists in some subjective state' it might be pleasure, it might be something like tranquility, or contentment, it might be something just like perceiving that your life is going well, or believing that it is. You could get any of those things in full, hooked up to the experience machine. So if you think that a life hooked up to such a machine wouldn't be a maximally flourishing life, and if you accept one of those theories of happiness, then you'll think that there's more to life than happiness.

What a lot of us care about, what's missing from life on the experience machine is a connection to reality. And you'll note that two of the conceptions of happiness that I mentioned, the conception that says what it is to be happy is to actually have your desires fulfilled, and not simply to believe that you do, and what it takes to be happy is to be living a flourishing life where that includes engaging in certain activities, really engaging them, friendship, community, all sorts of things like that, intellectual activity of various sorts, those two views you won't have everything, you know, you won't be happy hooked up to the experience machine because the connection with reality is missing. So that is in fact one reason why some people have been very tempted to understand happiness as something that involves necessarily some connection with reality.

Alan Saunders: On ABC Radio National, you're with The Philosopher's Zone, and we're listening to a talk given at the Sydney Writers' Festival by Caroline West, senior lecturer in philosophy at the University of Sydney.

Now we've heard that the word 'happiness' covers a multitude of things, which is confusing, but it gets worse. Some of those things might not be mutually compatible. If you want one, you might not be able to have the other.

Caroline West: Consider, as just one example, the well-publicised findings about the effects of children on happiness. Multiple studies find that people who choose to remain childless experience on average many more enjoyable moments and considerably few unpleasant moments over the course of their lives than those who have children. This is true for both men and women, but especially for women. If happiness means maximising the frequency of enjoyable moments in your life as some people suppose, then choosing to have children make you less happy.

On the other hand, having children and raising them to be well-adjusted, happy and productive members of the community, is an important life goal for many people. If happiness consists in fulfilling your aspirations, as other people claim, then having children makes you happier. Having children makes people happier in one way, and less happy in another.

The question to ponder I think when making these and other such big life decisions, is which kind of happiness, on careful reflection, you care about most.

Let me mention another example. Multiple studies find that over a certain surprisingly low threshold, about $US40,000 or equivalent, every extra dollar you earn makes very little, if any, difference to your happiness. But there's an interesting difference in the finding. One cluster of studies shows a steep increase in happiness from zero dollars to around about $27,000 a year, and a still increasing, but less steeply increasing rise between $27,000 and $40,000 a year, and a complete leveling off in happiness levels after $40,000 a year, until you get to $125-million a year, and you're on the Forbes Rich List where there's another sharp jump. So people on the Forbes Rich List, they don't just look happy, they probably genuinely are.

OK so that's one finding, which has a leveling off, almost complete leveling off in increases in happiness earning over $40,000 a year. There's a flat line. I mean the surprising finding is, it makes absolutely no difference to your happiness, whether you earn $40,000, $70,000, $150,000 or $3-million a year. I mean when you think of all the things that people give up in order to earn more money ...

But another cluster of studies, quite a number of them, show something different. There's a slight but nonetheless overall significant increase in happiness after $40,000. A less steep but still very steady increase in happiness all the way up until $125-million and then you're very happy. So you know, at some point along that line, that difference becomes really quite significant. So why the difference?

Well the first cluster of studies are looking at what psychologists call positive and negative affect. So that's to do with how you feel moment to moment, as you go about your life. Positive affect involves emotions like feeling cheery, feeling joy, feeling engaged, feeling interested; negative affect involves emotions like you know, feeling irritated, feeling bored, feeling discontent, feeling sad and so on.

The second group of studies are measuring something different. They're measuring life satisfaction, which is how people believe that their life is going, relative to their expectations. And judgments of life satisfaction, how you believe your life is going, those kinds of judgments are very heavily influenced by comparison. So they're influenced by two things: what you expect or want your life to be like, and sad but true, how favourably you compare to others around you. And wealth is a very sort of tangible measure, sort of objective measure that people can use to compare their own lives and how they're going, to people around them.

So, more money doesn't make a difference over $40,000 to how you actually feel moment to moment, as you go about your life. But it does make a difference to how satisfied you think your life is, to how you believe your life is going. So, let me ask the same question: Does earning more money, you know, over $40,000, make people happier? Again, it depends. It makes them happier in one way, more satisfied with their lives; I don't mean feel more satisfied with their lives, I mean think that their lives are going better; and it makes them no happier in another, in terms of how they feel moment to moment as they go about their life.

OK, so assuming you're an average person, should you want to earn more money? Again, I think it depends on which kind of happiness you care about most. Do you care about how you actually feel, moment-to-moment as you go about the daily life? Or do you care about how well you think your life is going? In other words, do you care about pleasure and enjoyment, and kind of affective mood states or do you care about your more intellectualized judgments about how your life is going?

OK, I think that's a question for individuals, but also note that there are some really interesting and difficult questions for policymakers around these sorts of issues, because some people think that the findings about income and wealth, in particular the fact that after $40,000 happiness sort of levels off, notwithstanding quite significant increases in income. I think this is a sort of strong argument for aggressive redistribution of income from people who earn over $40,000, to people who earn between zero and $27,000, because if it's true as the studies suggest, that every dollar over $40,000 that you earn makes very little difference to your happiness, but every dollar that someone gets if they're between zero and $27,000 makes an enormous difference to their happiness, and you want to do what makes most people happy, then there seems to be an argument for redistribution, taking from those who have more than $40,000 and giving to those who have between zero and $27,000.

OK, but whether there's a good argument here depends on what policymakers, what kind of happiness they think matters. So when the King of Bhutan proclaims gross national happiness to be the goal, and lots of us thought, How enlightened, we wish our government had done the same, gross national happiness is just a sort of catchy, lovely idea, lovely but empty idea, unless it's accompanied by some substantive theory of what happiness is. And I don't know what kind of happiness the King of Bhutan had in mind, but it would make a big difference to what he did whether he had in mind momentary sensations like pleasure and enjoyment, how people feel moment to moment as they go about their lives, or life satisfaction, how people think their lives are going. So there is this sort of difficult question: should governments care about how people actually feel, actually in some sense, you know, how they feel moment-to-moment as they go about their lives, or should they care about how people think their lives are going?

I think actually ignoring the latter, ignoring how people think their lives are going in favour of doing what will actually make them feel better, looks a little paternalistic to many people.

All right, so here's the general point: there are many different things that happiness might be. The word is really multiply ambiguous. In a perfect world I think we'd just get rid of it and talk more specifically about what we mean. And it really matters to notice how different the things called happiness are, because firstly it stops us talking past each other, and secondly, these things can and do come apart. So what will make you happier in one way may simultaneously make you less happy in another. So we need to think each for ourselves I think, about which kind of happiness, if any indeed, we care about most.

But this sort of answer can seem very unsatisfying to lots of people, because we're inclined to think, many of us, that there's something that happiness really is. If we only knew which of the six conceptions happiness really was, whether it really was pleasure, or it really was having your desires fulfilled, or it really was achieving your life aspiration, then we'd know what to be basing these and other important life decisions on.

The problem is I think, that there probably isn't an answer to the question of what happiness really is, and there's almost certainly no answer that everyone will agree with. And I think the reason for this lies in the fact that we've got two quite different ideas about what happiness is. These ideas are difficult, if not impossible to reconcile. On the one hand, we have an idea that we inherit partially anyway, from the ancient Greeks, that happiness is something that everyone seeks for its own sake. On the other hand, we have certain more substantive ideas about what kind of state happiness is, for instance, that it's pleasure, or that it's being in a certain mood. With a little arm-twisting, you can get people to agree (I try this in my Philosophy of Happiness class - I can see some people here from there) so with a little arm-twisting, you can get people to agree, or at least to pretend to agree, just for the sake of argument, that happiness is something that everyone seeks for its own sake. But then it's almost impossible to get them to agree about the substantive question of what happiness is, because people seek different things, and people will regard different of the kinds of happiness I distinguished earlier as being worth seeking.

Conversely, with a little arm-twisting, you can get people to agree, or at least to pretend to agree for the sake of argument, that happiness consists in a particular state, like pleasure for example. But then it becomes almost impossible to get agreement about the other strand whether happiness so understood is something that's worth seeking. And this goes not just for pleasure but for all of the different things I mentioned before: fulfilling your life aspirations, or mood states like tranquility. You know, some people think tranquility is enormously worth seeking, other people, especially young people, think tranquility, pah! excitement.

What we want I think when we want to know what happiness really is, is to know the nature of that state that we ought to be seeking in our own lives and striving as best we can to bring to others. But it's not obvious, I think, that there is any one such state.

Alan Saunders: Caroline West, at the Sydney Writers' Festival.

And one important element of happiness is anticipation, so I'm happy to be able to tell you that Caroline's book about happiness should be out next year.

The Philosopher's Zone is produced by Kyla Slaven, with technical production by the ever-blissful Charlie McCune.